


seven theses on the disappearance of a boy

by TobermorianSass



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Aftermath of brainwashing, Character Study, Gen, Memory Alteration, fic of a fic, metafic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-13
Updated: 2017-02-13
Packaged: 2018-09-24 03:05:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,720
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9696944
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TobermorianSass/pseuds/TobermorianSass
Summary: People do not disappear overnight and so she traces the paths of disappearance to arrive at a conclusion that explains why she cannot remember how her twin died and why, even though she knows so much else, she cannot remember his face.Set during the events ofa blank slateby EssayOfThoughts.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [EssayOfThoughts](https://archiveofourown.org/users/EssayOfThoughts/gifts).
  * Inspired by [a blank slate](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8437351) by [EssayOfThoughts](https://archiveofourown.org/users/EssayOfThoughts/pseuds/EssayOfThoughts). 



> dedicated to EssayOfThoughts who wrote the amazing [a blank slate](http://archiveofourown.org/works/8437351?view_full_work=true) during which this fic is set. The ending is a direct quote from her fic. Happy birthday dear, I hope you enjoy this <3

**i.**

Aloneness.

**ii.**

Too bright, too indistinct.

**iii.**

The absence of material evidence is crucial to a good disappearance. Bodies do not disappear. Evaporate. Atomize. Bodies are permanent beings. Boys are volitional ones. Both must be disposed of completely for a disappearance to be perfected. She and Silver know this too well. They are skilled at it. It is what HYDRA requires of them after all. It is what they have promised. It is what they do. It is what she does. For --- for -- for her --- for her brother.

Her brother is dead. There is no material evidence to suggest otherwise.

**iv.**

P-I-E-T-R-O

**v.**

Pietro. Her brother.

**vi.**

For a disappearance to truly take place there must be an absence. A disappearance from time and space as it exists in the mind of another person. One moment they are here. The next, they are not. The rupture between the then and the now is sharp and perfect. The train derails. The memories end abruptly. They do not resume.

Her mind is a sieve filled with a red sea that rises and rises and pours out through the million tiny holes drilled into the fabric of her memory. There are memories with no faces. Memories with no voices. Memories drenched in fog. Memories from the wrong end of a telescope. Memories from underneath a sea where the roar of water and the roar of the waves overpowers the muffled voice laughing above. Memories where, like a badly recorded tape, the sound cuts off halfway leaving her with dead silence. Memories where faces are blurred, where she and Pietro talk but his face cannot be seen. Memories like photographs that someone has taken a scissor to and meticulously exorcised the unhappy and unwanted faces. And where they could not cut: cigarette burns and acetone blurs. Anything to remove him from her mind. A complete and perfect disappearance.

She did this. She did this on her own. Grief is the most powerful exorcist. They say her mind broke under the strain when she woke and they told her her brother was dead. A loop between forgetting and not forgetting. She was violent. Unpredictable. She is better now. Tame. Peaceful. Her mind is a blood-drenched shore with a red tide that washes over her as she sits waiting and waiting and waiting, discarding one photograph after the other in search - in search -

\- in search of nothing. She did this to herself. It was not done to her. She did this herself.

**iv.**

The body never truly forgets. There are holes in her mind but the body never forgets. The boy called Silver curves into the space around her and her body remembers a sensation: another body against hers. Her twin brother’s body. Her dead twin brother’s body. A phantom limb. Silver fills it perfectly. The body does not forget.

But she does.

**v.**

Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Grief.

**vi.**

She cannot accept it.

**vii.**

She will never accept it.

**viii.**

They will never make her accept it.

**viii.**

The human mind is a fragile and notoriously unreliable device. She wakes up and feels like she has always been waking up. She runs and all places are the same. She has been here before and never been here before. She has been awake and never been awake. Time and space do not exist. Her mind is a sieve filled with a blood red-scarlet that threatens to pour over her. Time and space should be discrete. Each moment unique. Her mind is a sieve. Her mind is a sieve. Her mind is a shore along a blood-red tide.

She knows what memories are like. What minds are like. HYDRA sends them out onto the field and she reaches into them. The human mind is fickle. Fragile. Her scarlet carries whispers like tiny ripples into their minds and they grow them. Not her. She sends the ripples out, but they are the ones who catch these drifting threads of scarlet and give them roots, give them leaves, branches, fruits. An ecosystem invented out of nothing. The mind grows itself - and the mind destroys itself.

Her mind is a sieve and it is leaking. The photographs disappear one by one. It isn’t her shredding them and flinging them to the winds along the red-drenched shores of her mind. Her body does this spontaneously. Her mind is a sieve: a porous and ragged scarlet fabric that stretches and stretches and is tearing, slowly tearing. A tide is rising, but it is not hers. It is a tide which carries memories of time and space that are all the same and not the same. It sweeps away the burnt-out, cut-out, half-shredded photographs and everyday, she remembers a little less. The burns grow bigger. The blurriness expands. The telescope lengthens. She sinks further under the waves.

This is natural. The memories which go nowhere, the dead-end memories are discarded. Unused neural pathways disappear. And she has no need to trace these pathways, except at night where she lies awake and runs down these labyrinths, chasing left, right, right, right, left - lost, lost always lost, always reaching and always missing, always left with these meaningless half-nothings. Placeholder memories to assure her yes, she once had a brother and yes, his name was Pietro. What the mind cannot connect, it disposes of. This is natural. This is how bodies work. This is nature at work, not HYDRA, never HYDRA, especially not HYDRA.

The body is a traitor. Her body is a traitor. Her body. It is a traitor.

**ix.**

Write it so you do not forget.

**x.**

HYDRA is everywhere.

**vii.**

When people die they leave behind traces of themselves. Talismans. Graves. Loose strands of hair. Wills. Pasts. Memories. When her brother dies, she is left with nothing. Not even his face. Not even the memory of his face. She only has a whited blur.

This is not normal.

**vi.**

A boy screams. It cuts abruptly into silence.

**v.**

She’s certain about so little. She shouldn’t be certain about this fact.

**iv.**

Bodies do not vanish, but the mind might be tricked into believing they do. She reads and reads, searching for an answer, for a clue somewhere and HYDRA feeds her, greedily believing she is a tool in their hands. She is not. They do not need to know that. They feed her histories. They feed her propaganda. She doesn’t know how she knows, but her body, her bones remember the sound of the words and tingles all over when she hears them. In the nineteen-fifties, in search of a magic pill to expunge the red peril, the American military commissioned a series of experiments to test the furthest possibilities of the human mind. While the Russians were experimenting with brainwashing, says her book, the Americans were toying with the possibility of creating a single pill to render the mind suggestible. To make planting false memories easy. To make creating agents out of nothing easy: no more recruiting, no more long games. Just one pill slipped into a drink and a whole new person emerges on the other end. By the mid-seventies, they knew they no longer needed a magic pill. The human mind could do it on its own. All they needed to do was plant that seed of doubt, plant a suggestion (did the glass shatter when the car smashed into the wall? when it collided? when it bumped?). The mind filled in the rest. Children remembered being lost. Eyewitnesses remembered glass, remembered speed, remembered colours. They no longer needed to spend their money on pills, says her book. The human mind came readymade, equipped to be fucked with, equipped to be wiped and molded into whatever you wanted it to be. Whatever _they_ wanted it to be.

HYDRA was simply a truth-seeker, truth-teller, truth-deliverer. The world made minds. HYDRA was a project of deliverance. She and Silver were tools, just like the book was a tool in her hands. They were miracles. They were saviors. They were tools. They were _made_.

Her mind is a sieve and she has leaked away all that she once was. All that is left is a shore. Long and bleak and endless and grey. She has never seen the sea, but this is how she imagines it might look. All still and dead, not a single sign of life except for her, crouched in the sand as shredded photographs fall like snow around her. They fall and they fall and they fall, catching in her hair, ghosting along her cheek, between her fingers. They fall and they do not stop as they twist and whirl between the drifting scarlet threads. Her mind is a sieve. It broke under the strain of her brother’s death, a recursive loop between the desire to forget and the desire to remember. She knows this. List has apologized for this. Offered condolences. Offered vengeance. Her mind is full of holes, missing parts, missing memories. She has told herself this is natural. What cannot be remembered is forever lost. This is how bodies works. This is how minds work. It is physically impossible to know everything that is inside the mind and hers is a _labyrinth_.

It is possible, just possible, that this maze conceals another maze, one planted there by HYDRA. She is a tool and tools with minds of their own are unreliable. It says so in her book. Sure, it’s the Americans who say this. Or perhaps the Russians. But HYDRA - HYDRA is borderless and it does not matter who said it first. Her mind is a sieve and she will never know how many triggers and switches and kill buttons have been buried beyond the porous fabric of her memories.

Whether the porous fabric of her memories are hers.

**iii.**

If a disappearance has no face, has no material evidence, no lingering traces, if the body does not forget and if the mind is fragile and notoriously unreliable and if she is a tool: has a disappearance occurred in the first place at all?

**ii.**

The first words that pierce the blinding brightness which surrounds her are this: _we are sorry. Your brother is dead, child. We can’t bring him to you_.

**i.**

We must leave now, she says. No hesitation, no plan.

**zero.**

HYDRA lies.

**Author's Note:**

> The experiments from the 50s referred to in this fic are vaguely based on MKULTRA. The memory experiments are actual experiments conducted by Elizabeth Loftus c. 1974.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [seven theses on the disappearance of a girl](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11255499) by [EssayOfThoughts](https://archiveofourown.org/users/EssayOfThoughts/pseuds/EssayOfThoughts)




End file.
